Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday September 28, 2011 @08:50AM
from the one-crap-standard-to-rule-them-all dept.

PolygamousRanchKid writes with an article in CNet about yet more dismal news for MeeGo. Quoting the article: "Like the Moblin operating system before it, Linux-based MeeGo will will be merged out of existence. MeeGo will become Tizen, Intel said today. 'Intel joined Linux Foundation and LiMo Foundation in support of Tizen, a new Linux-based open source software platform for multiple device categories,' the company said in a statement. 'Tizen builds upon the strengths of both LiMo and MeeGo and Intel will be working with our MeeGo partners to help them transition to Tizen,' Intel said. The initial release of Tizen is expected in Q1 2012, enabling the first devices in the market mid-2012..."
PolygamousRanchKid adds "It seems one of those strengths is not actually making it into a product on the market yet." This on the heels of Nokia shipping the N9 (which is actually running a weird Maemo/Meego hybrid).

This sounds like a great thing, not at all like the title implies. Pooling the rescources into a project that has a greater chance of success, should prove a good thing for everyone who cares about MeeGo. There's enough of a lead for the competetion as it is, even without dividing the OS community into different factions.

Except it's happened so often now with this 'family' of distributions, each time effectively killing the project it was merged with, and always either just before or just after a single tangible product is actually released and before it has a chance to succeed. It's like duke nukem forever, except the game title changes every month and a new publisher/developer replaces an old one in an attempt to breathe life into the deadend sinkhole of a project. This 'intel mobile linux distribution' thing is a plagu

I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out, but maybe all these projects are dying because they are pointless? Apple rules the tablet, MSFT the desktop, and the phone is split between Apple and Google. So where is the market they were going to capture? Geeks that actually even know what 'free as in freedom' means much less cares about it are probably in the 0.03% range, so no real growth there. Hell the rest of the planet happily sends their data freely to Google and their money to Apple and MSFT so i can

I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out, but maybe all these projects are dying because they are pointless? Apple rules the tablet, MSFT the desktop, and the phone is split between Apple and Google. So where is the market they were going to capture?

Of course, if everybody thought like that, Apple would never have gone on to rule the tablet, nor MSFT the desktop, and neither Apple nor Google would be in the phone market. All of these segments were dominated by other vendors before.

So, far from being pointless, projects like Maemo are very interesting, because they have the potential to bring something new (and, in this case, more standard and open) to the scene. That's why it is so sad they have been going nowhere, and that is why we have this story on Slashdot. If it wasn't for that, Meego would just be another unpopular project that nobody cared about. It is interesting because, at least in theory, it could break the grasp of the major vendors.

We have this story on/. because its FOSS. Be honest if a developer let a big we juicy fart and wrote an article called "FOSS causes the winds" it would be front page here, as there are so many FOSSies as i call them.

Nothing against FOSS, I personally use it on Windows all the time, but the kind of FOSSies we get here are the kind that will argue up and down, totally seriously mind you, that making things easier for the users is "dumbed down" and that all should be forced to use CLI because doing things th

Sadly, I agree with you to some extent. Maemo, I like. It brought major power to a hand-held device, had a full Linux stack, could run chroots of other OS's, and allowed custom kernels etc.It also has a *great* multitasking ability, though, obviously, leaving things running eats battery life.

MeeGo... As far as I can tell, it has none of the benefits of Maemo, and with a lot of drawbacks including being locked down with digital signatures.

Also, as far as a rollback button? Two points:1, I did something simil

Cool what you did with the N900, and while I haven't seen Maemo i'll take your word for it, with so many fans it had to have something going. but the Meego? Bad iOS/Droid ripoff from what I saw. Frankly if they released it would be a touchpad sized bomb and certainly wouldn't be selling more Intel chips or challenging Wintel.

As for Chrome OS? Not even close. Imagine a machine that takes a snapshot, quickly and cleanly, every time you boot. you can install what you want, do what you want, screw something up?

So in an already overcrowded arena Intel looked at the writing on the wall and saw they were just wasting good money on a dead end.

But that's the thing, they haven't seen the writing on the wall and are persisting to try it. The people they partnered with saw it and fleed but Intel continue to flog the dead horse, hence this new-but-old project now

Well, and the difference is that producing hardware is not exactly cheap. So we've got the N900 running Maemo5 which is rather strongly different from earlier releases on the N8xx devices. Then we were told, after the N900 was received nicely (as a mobile, not a tablet), from Nokia that they'll merge Maemo into Meego.At the same time, the whole distribution was changing over from Gtk to Qt, because Nokia wanted one toolkit that works on all it's platforms. Than Nokia decided to get paid for committing suici

It isn't a good thing. I don't know what moblin was like, but Mameo was pretty much a fully complete, working operating system that shipped on actual devices the merger with Moblin set them back a couple years. Nokia would have been better off to decline the invitation to merge with Moblin.

Moblin was a sad joke that never worked well in ANY incarnation, and it was no loss to see it go. I played with several versions and all gave me free reboots and lots of explosions in the UI. When you add to that the fact that most of what Intel did was rip out support for competing processors, it's hard to see why anyone ever got excited about Moblin.

Meego was a Qt-based Linux distribution. The main point was running native apps on it, taking advantage of the fact that Meego, Symbian and S40 all run Qt (you can target Meego just by recompiling the software you wrote for the millions of Symbian^3 and S40 devices out there. It would have a gigantic number of apps right from the start, and very clear Linux roots.

This Tizen thing is a browser. Just HTML5 apps. In other words, apps that every other platform can run; no exclusive apps. No incentive to develop

Yep. On the other hand, the LiMo Foundation's entire purpose was to develop a closed source platform for mobile phones based on top of Linux. They tried to obtain the cost savings associated with open source by adopting open source-style development practices and using a license that granted access to the source code to members of the group, but with a restriction preventing their members from sharing the LiMo source code with anyone outside of the foundation. (IIRC members weren't even allowed to share sou

My prediction - in early 2014, Samsung will announce that they are stopping their Tizen efforts to concentrate on Android. Later in 2014, they will finally release their one and only (ARM based) Tizen device, and Intel will announce a new partnership with HTC to develop a new Linux based phone OS so that Intel CPUs can take over the smartphone market (having lost most of the desktop market to ARM by this point), with first release in early 20

this reminds me of the standards [xkcd.com] Only that instead of standards it's linux type OSs comunities that get populated and perpetuated.

<drivel><halfbaked>This is sad, very very sad...Can we at least now acknowledge that the FOSS community has to build the OS top down on their own so that we actually get a product? I mean there is Actually arch for arm devices [archlinuxarm.org].Just convince some desktop devs to throw together a basic tablet/touch UI from spare code left and right (lets call it gnome 3.3)And then just

Board members: MeeGo, we need to talkMeeGo: MeeGo is listening?Board members: It's not working out, we're going to have to let you goMeeGo: We go?Board members: No, just youMeeGo: Me go?Board members: Yes, MeeGo, you goMeeGo: MeeGo go?Board members: (sigh) Just get out

It would look as it a mobile OS is only reachable by big megacorps (iOS, Android, Windows). Community based devlopment will never work here as every company has their own agenda to push and want it now. This is a recipe for disaster.

Well to get your nerd credentials renewed you need to buy N9, it has MeeGo/Harmattan. Of course it works better than Windows. After all it is powered by *drum roll* LINUX!!! (is there anything it can't do?)

Community based development? Meego was Intel and Nokia. Tizen is Intel and Samsung. At least they picked a partner whose market share is increasing this time, though if Samsung abandons Android for Tizen, their fortunes may change rather abruptly.

I don't see Meego as dead or failed (neither Moblin or Maemo) as dead or failing, but evolving, as experiments that needed a bit of extra thinking and making new iterations with the learned experience.

N900 is a great device but it has no AT&T 3G frequencies and no proper Exchange support (provisioning, certificate authentication) and the arrogant attitude of the Nokia devs that worked on Exchange support.The othe problem it has is the fact that Nokia usually puts about half of the memory the system needs on all N devices.64MB on N770 was a joke, then 128MB on N800/810 was barely to keep the OS so the browser blows up on any bigger web page. Then they put 256MB in N900 which is still way too little. T

I'll admit the N900's hardware is woefully underpowered, and that's actually why I was hoping so very much for *some* sort of update; even the minor one of the n9/n950 would be appreciated.

In spite of that, I *vastly* prefer it over the Epic 4G that I currently use as my main phone, mainly because it's real Linux (and all the usual, wonderful tools that includes) instead of java-ish half-breed that barely counts as linux.

The nice thing about platforms not tied to particular hardware is that can be installed in other (older or newer) devices. I can install meego in my N900, and probably will be able to install Tizen on it. And wouldnt be so surprised if Tizen can be installed in current netbooks/tablets bundled with Meego, or android devices could be rooted to install it too.

WebOS isn't dead, it's just on life support. HP still wants to use it in printers and other devices, they're just getting out of the phone and tablet markets. They're also trying to license it. I'd love to see HTC or someone license WebOS - HP was kind enough to send me a TouchPad, and it's a really beautifully designed system.

Good news, Linux Foundation is in charge. Some of you may not have followed along since the beginning, but Moblin begat Meego, and what was Moblin? Intel put a Clutter-based UI on Linux after stripping its ability to run on anything not based on a recent Intel CPU. Whoop. De. Doo. None of what Intel did to Linux with Moblin has any repercussions for anyone not using an x86-compatible Intel processor. While that does still seem to cover the majority of the market, it's still not an interesting basis for a Linux distribution; rather, it is a collection of features which by now have made it into the mainline.

So the bad news is that Intel has given up on the notion that x86 is ready for phones, but that's good news too. And meanwhile, Intel can go back to doing what they do best, trying to trip AMD up so that they don't have to compete on a level playing field. Since anyone can contribute to Linux, they were never going to differentiate themselves from AMD there.

I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say "None of what Intel did to Linux with Moblin has any repercussions for anyone not using an x86-compatible Intel processor." For now I will interpret that as "they did nothing of interest for machines with CPUs from AMD/ARM etc.

I'm not sure I buy that "Intel has given up on the notion that x86 is ready for phones", given that they recently showcased an x86-Android tablet. It's just a different strategy. In my opinion, they should have done this in February, when Nokia stabbed them in the back.

Tablets next to phones, or which contain a phone radio yet do not function as phones, are still viable contexts for x86. However, Intel still has yet to show a CPU+Chipset with a viable TDP for anything that fits in your pocket and lasts all day.

How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?

Smartphones these days are close to general-purpose computers (albeit with mobile telephony hardware), but these companies have spent tens if not hundreds of man-years trying and failing to do little more than port an already-written OS to a new hardware platform and add a few simple apps (phone dialer/receiver, contact database, appointments/reminder app, and port a browser and media play

The reason is C. The free software world is stuck with writing stuff in C, which is a low-level language not at all suitable to writing a complicated system that a smartphone needs. Both Java and Objective C, that iOS uses, brings huge productivity boosts over writing stuff in C which is why those platforms have been able to evolve so rapidly.

How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?

I've highlighted the relevant word for you. It's because these are companies with bureaucratic processes and hidden agendas. In these alliances, they cooperate on low-level stuff but try to preserve some sort of "secret sauce," to the detriment of the whole, and that's when they're working properly. Very few companies have the successful dictator like Steve Jobs of Apple.

Reading the announcement of Tizen, it looks like another Android, a linux backend with an interpreted front-end. It mentions HTML5 as the primary API, how well that will work remains to be seen. It mentions an NDK, but frankly, I was hoping for a replacement for the N900 OS, i.e. something that would run unmodified Linux applications - and this doesn't look like it.

That and the idea of developers having to target yet another incompatible platform alongside IOS, Android, RIM and that other one doesn't exac

The only chance to succeed is to offer the same front-end APIs/runtime/libs to work (adapted) on true Linux OS. You probably won't have full acceess to Posix, neither a hi-res screen in Tizen, but its native apps should run bigger and faster in a desktop just recompiling (or even better without recompiling).
Develop once, run it everywhere. That's the only missing offer in the smartphone/tablet ecosystem nowadays (I'm skeptic about W8 promises).

The only chance to succeed is to offer the same front-end APIs/runtime/libs to work (adapted) on true Linux OS. You probably won't have full acceess to Posix, neither a hi-res screen in Tizen, but its native apps should run bigger and faster in a desktop just recompiling (or even better without recompiling).

Worst case, the NDK is probably "The Best Of POSIX", like the Android one. That alone would be useful, since you could reuse any Android NDK stuff, but what I really wanted out of Meego was something that can run SSH, Gimp and Pidgin on a tablet or ARM laptop.

I really wanted the n900, and would have bought one except that I had purchased the n770 several years earlier. The n770 was a great little tablet, very cool, out to market way ahead of the iPhone with all of the features except the phone. When Nokia upgraded to the n800, the n770 lost all support from maemo. The new OS couldnt back port, all apps were being supported on the new OS, so my cool little device just sat there with no community and no support. I was very wary of the n900 for this, and waited to

That was less due to the OS and more due to the device itself. It couldn't hold the OS that they arrived at with the version for the N8x0 series. Blame Nokia for cheapening the N770 too much (there were design "oopses" within the N770 that led me to wait until the N800 came out...) there.

that doesnt mean that they should have just removed all support, effort and updates immediately. They basically forced all customers to upgrade hardware to continue to have application support. This was a consistent behavior from Nokia. I wont believe that anything with roots in these projects will ever stop the cycle until I actually see it happen.

I think this is close to accurate... all coming from memory.The 800 replaced the 770. The 880 was a minor upgrade that I dont think required full hardware upgrad

I bought an N900 precisely because it was OPEN and didnt try tostop me from running what I want to.

My N900 does not support Cell Broadcast SMS. However, the support is there in the cellular modem and telephony stack.

Thanks to a small binary patch to the SMS library and a (yet to be written) GUI app its possible to add Cell Broadcast SMS to this phone. Try doing that on an iPhone without months of reverse engineering of every piece of the telephony stack. And then find a way to release it without being sued

I can't help but notice that Samsung is a partner. Could this be the OS we kept hearing rumors about? You know the one where Samsung is nervous about Google's purchase of Motorola and needs to hedge its bets by having their own OS.

I would love to see Meego/Tizen continue to exist. I'm glad Samsung is stepping up to replace Nokia that went to Microsoft.

Samsung already has their own OS Bada. It is deployed on actual devices in Europe. Samsung says they will keep it for the lower end phones, but there is nothing stopping them from evolving it further. I don't really understand their interest in Tizen?

Now if only they will bring back Maemo's Debian-based package management and properly maintained Qt support to their native applications, and it will be back to the direction where Maemo was supposed to be heading before Nokia fucked up.

Making it possible to merge at least some things that are now maintained in Maemo Community SSU [maemo.org] (last updated September 7 2011 if anyone did not notice), would be nice, too, however there certainly will be incompatibility with that.

MeeGo failed (because it was too late). LiMo failed (because no-one wanted it). It's hardly the best combination to make a new OS. Besides, there are too many mobile OSes out there. Remember webOS? Symbian? BlackBerry OS is sliding the same way and Windows is currently hovering near 0% too.

How exactly are Tizer.. I mean Tizen hoping to promote this? "It's a bit like Android but it's not Android"?

There is already a Linux platform for small devices, it is called Angstrom, it is based on OpenEmbedded, and it runs on a bunch of ARM-based PDAs, on bog-standard PCs, and lots of other devices besides. If half of the work that went into Moblin, MeeGo, and all this other nonsense had gone into Angstrom, we could all be using it now.

What options does this leave for Qt-based development on embedded platforms?

Maemo [nokia.com] on the N900 felt like the right direction with Nokia backing Qt, especially with projects like PySide [pyside.org] created soley to offer a LGPL-licensed Python wrapper available to commercial developers (as opposed to PyQt [riverbankcomputing.co.uk]). This permitted a single codebase to target desktop and mobile/tablet environments using a pleasant and completely open toolchain. MeeGo was set to carry on with Qt/X11.

The future of Qt in relation to Tizen is uncertain. It was not mentioned in any of today’s press releases. The Tizen website does make reference to a native development, but does not provide any further details. Instead HTML 5 is promoted as the development environment of choice and in an elastic piece of thinking is given as the reason for the need to evolve MeeGo.

However, Qt is a key component in many MeeGo related projects (e.g. part of t

It seems likely that politics has a role to play here. Qt came into the MeeGo project from Nokia. Despite recent moves towards open governance, is still very much associated with Nokia. Intel were unhappy that Nokia switched to Windows Phone and the member of LiMo (including Samsung) may prefer to avoid mentioning or relying on what is perceived to be a competitor's asset.

In the early nineties Apple was trying to get more leverage for its platforms by letting others in on its fantastic architecture and OS. Steve Jobs proved this to be a mistake. Noka is repeating it. I wonder when they wake up. Intel was never on the bandwagon. Maemo was one polished system. The Intel lever was as necessary as a fifth wheel on a cart.

I don't know what the deal is..
I had an Amiga 1000... loved it (superior in sooooo many ways) ! Then Commodore blew it.
Then I had the Nokia 770... loved it! But, Nokia never really did anything with it
Then I got the Nokia N800... loved it! But, Nokia blew it.
Then I saw the N9... I want it... then Nokia Blows it before even releasing it
WTF?!?!?

hmmmm... I bet the problem is me...

I formally apologize for liking Nokia.Now...maybe they can get their head out of their butts.

The Tizen application programming interfaces are based on HTML5 and other web standards, and we anticipate that the vast majority of Tizen application development will be based on these emerging standards.

This is what made me not interested in WebOS. IIRC, they added support for native code soon after, but, initially, they pushed it as a HTML+JavaScript platform. We already have that. And I don't want it.

And that made sense to me. By lowering the costs of the software, they can make really cheap devices, like the EEE PC X101 (200 USD or 179 EURO). Also, if almost all the code is native, they can provide their software products and services not only to device manufacturers, but also to developers (e.g., a very specialiced compiler/debugger/profiler

Oh man... Android is FAR from unprofitable for Google. Sure, the OS itself doesn't generate any revenue, but it's a platform Google has control over (that alone is invaluable) and with which they can push their shit your way (more $ there).

Android is the proverbial cheap razor that allows Google to sell blades.

Java was never a platform except for some horribly failed "Java Desktop System", it's a programming language. Microsoft makes.NET to sell Windows. Apple makes iOS to sell iDevices, Google makes Android to push Google services, Sun made Java to do what exactly? I never figured it out, they never seemed to get any real kickback from people using Java. No hardware sales, no software sales, no licensing fees, no split of any profits of anything built using Java that I can tell. Don't get me wrong, it was nice

I never figured it out, they never seemed to get any real kickback from people using Java. No hardware sales, no software sales, no licensing fees, no split of any profits of anything built using Java that I can tell.

They licensed [cnet.com] it to mobile devices, and I think some other partners as well:

"That had become lucrative: a source familiar with Sun's Java work said royalty payments for mobile Java was the dominant part of the hundreds of millions of dollars a year Sun took garnered in Java revenue. "

You're right, though, that for as big as Java was brand-wise, they didn't profit all that much. Then again, they ended up being bought by Oracle for a lot of money, and a big part o

I really agree with that above. When reading: "The Tizen application programming interfaces are based on HTML5 and other web standards, and we anticipate that the vast majority of Tizen application development will be based on these emerging standards.", just one word pops to my mind: what a tragedy...

What made maemo a so nice platform? Simple: it's support for Qt, GTK, Python, PulseAudio, and other standards we already have in Linux. There was no need to write new application, just a bit of redesign of t

Mind you, I know what I'm talking about. I've written some Ajax stuff myself, with drag'n'drop, and all the fancy stuff. I also wrote a toolkit myself. I also used many libs, like extjs and so on (I maintain libjs-extjs in Debian). So no, I haven't stayed in the cave for the last 10 years. I absolutely know you CAN write a GUI in HTML, but that's crap. It's like chop stick to eat a steak: it's not a tool adapted for what you want, so the result is ugly, and you get your face dirty in the process.

It seems unlikely that they'll write their own rendering engine or switch the whole project over to GTK, so probably this will be running WebKit on Qt. Perhaps even on XCB if they're feeling ambitious - Qt on X11 suffers from layering performance problems (one of the Qt devs has a good blog post on all the inefficiencies from the driver layer on up).